As I’ve mentioned before, Minecraft is memory intensive. Minecraft Overviewer is also memory intensive. I would recommend at least a Signature VPS for hosting a Minecraft server, but an Ultimate would be better.

Download and install the Minecraft Overviewer repository

Note: the wget command works for CentOS, Red Hat EL, and Fedora operating systems. If you are running another OS, check out the Overviewer downloads page for more help.

Configure Minecraft Overviewer

The configuration of Overviewer can be tricky, but it really boils down to two things:

Where is your Overviewer configuration?

How/where do you want to view the map?

Finding your Overviewer configuration

I have my minecraft server installed in /home/minecraft — a cPanel account. That places my world directory in /home/minecraft/world. Note where your world directory is. Now decide where you want to place your overviewer configuration information — I placed mine in /home/minecraft/overviewer. You will need two files in this directory, the textures file and the overview configuration.

Upload your preferred textures.

You will need to upload the textures you want to use, you can do this with FTP, SCP, rsync, the cPanel file manager — basically anyway you would normally upload files to the server. My preference is to use the default textures for Minecraft, which can be found in your Minecraft game client. For example, my game client is loaded on my home computer running Ubuntu. Here is the location for textures in Ubuntu:

/home/account/.minecraft/versions/1.7.5/1.7.5.jar

I placed this file in my Overviewer directory:

/home/minecraft/overviewer/

Create your configuration file.

The configuration file will tie everything together. Create a file and place it in your chosen directory. I called mine overviewer.cnf and placed it in /home/minecraft/overviewer along with the textures file.

The worlds line covers where your Minecraft world is stored, renders covers the type of render and what you want it to be named, the outputdir is where it places the finished render, and texturepath is the location from which Overviewer pulls the map textures to generate the map.

Generate your Minecraft Overviewer map

Once you’ve completed the Minecraft Overviewer configuration, you can run Overviewer with this command:

overviewer.py --config=/home/minecraft/overviewer/overviewer.cnf

This will generate the map in the public_html directory of the account you set. If you ran this as the root user you will need to change the owner from root to the cPanel account name. At this point you should be able to view the map in your web browser.

If you want to have this run automatically — and you probably will — you will need to create a cron job in cPanel. Log into cPanel and create a cron job with the command:

overviewer.py --config=/home/minecraft/overviewer/overviewer.cnf

The frequency is up to you, but cPanel will have some examples and recommendations. To view the map from a website the permissions will need to be account:account.

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Escalated Technician, ServInt

Bill Brooks is an Escalated Technician and the Continuing Education Facilitator for ServInt’s Managed Services Team. He is a life-long tech enthusiast and enjoys music, video games and hockey on the side.